“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Relationships can fall into a cycle of offense and defense. Some one offends you, willingly or not, they hurt you. You defend yourself, either with your words or with your silence you erect a barrier, to protect yourself. It's natural, it's what we do. Then often the other person takes your words in defense as an attack on them, or your silence as an emotional embargo, the dark silence of disapproval. So they construct their own defense to protect themselves from your offense. And so the cycle goes, until it is broken by something beyond natural.
This is why love is a choice, and Love itself is super-natural. It is choosing to ignore their offence and your nature. It's a laying down of your weapons and walking headlong into oncoming fire, putting your need for emotional safety aside to rescue a comrade-in-arms locked inside a castle of despair.
The most surprising thing I have found about the doors people shut in your face is that they rarely lock them. They are hoping you'll at least turn the knob and try. Every one is hoping that some one else can love them more than they can love themselves. To achieve this is to know yourself in Christ, to be so loved that disarming yourself to love others is more your nature than to hurt back. To be more than complete, to have pieces left over that you can give to others, like the bread broken and multiplied, so that all were full and leftovers were gathered. Are you that complete? Do you really know how to love?
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